Google Books On The iPhone and G1 Is Almost Kindle-Like (And Real Mobile Kindle May Be Coming Soon) rightly raves about about the mobile version of Google Books. It works great on an iPhone (and it turns out the rumors about Kindle coming to the iPhone were right; see also my LRC post Kindle v. Netbook v. ePub, Bookworm and Stanza).
However, it turns out that you can only see “free” google books in mobile site. For example, on my iPhone I cannot see the 1907 Edith Nesbit book The Enchanted Castle in the mobile-optimized version of Google Books. (Try it even from a regular browser, from that mobile site, you’ll see what I mean.) However, if you go to the regular Google Books site, you can find and read the whole thing–even on an iPhone. You just can’t use the mobile-optimized version of Google Books to view it–even on a computer. So you can read the book on an iPhone, but not in a mobile-optimized format.
I suspect that Google did this because of copyright concerns, as part of their deal with publishers–perhaps it made them carve out something for mobile phones or platforms. It’s amazing how much copyright law distorts our entire economy.
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This honestly looks more like a technical oversight than a deliberate denial to allow reading this particular book in the mobile edition of Google Books. Did you contact Google to see if this was the case or not?
Good news–Kindle for iPhone arrived yesterday!
http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090303/that-was-fast-kindle-meet-the-iphone/
Okay, seriously, what is the best PDA for a guy who is no longer networked with a big institution with some big name network server. So many recommend the iPhone, but I am not a smelly hippy dippy flower pippy, so surely there must be something else that can send and receive email, calendar and allow for some web searches of Megan Fox pics? The new Android phone maybe?
@hl
I have been also looking for a while, and the final decision was between HTC Touch HD ( http://www.htc.com/www/product/touchhd/overview.html ) and Open Pandora ( http://www.openpandora.org/index_en.php ) . I ordered an Open Pandora and we’ll see how it turns out.
I have android on my Neo Freerunner, but I don’t think it’s usable for day to day work (maybe it’s better on the HTC phone).
Cellofellow: I do not think it’s a mistake. In the mobile site, if you change from “free books” to “all books,” the book shows up, and explicitly says, “no mobile preview available.”
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